On several occasions over the last few years, various economists and policymakers have expressed the opinion that the stock market was overvalued. They often compared the situation with the 1920s and warned that the U.S. economy was headed for a similar collapse. Some analysts also suggested...

This paper investigates the relation between inflation uncertainty and excess returns on stocks and bonds. It quantifies the effect of inflation uncertainty by comparing actual excess returns with those expected by a hypothetical naive investor who treats inflation forecasts as if they were...

We use Bayesian methods to estimate two models of post WWII U.S. inflation rates with drifting stochastic volatility and drifting coefficients. One model is univariate, the other a multivariate autoregression. We define the inflation gap as the deviation of inflation from a pure random walk...

For a VAR with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities, the authors present posterior densities for several objects that are of interest for designing and evaluating monetary policy. These include measures of inflation persistence, the natural rate of unemployment, a core rate of...

This paper compares sample fluctuations of the US business cycle with those predicted by a class of equilibrium monetary business cycle models. The predictions of the models are generated using the long-run neutrality restrictions implicit in the models. By imposing these restrictions on sample...

By positing learning and a pessimistic initial prior, we build a model that disconnects a representative consumer's subjective attitudes toward risk from the high price of risk that a rational-expectations econometrician would deduce from financial market data. We follow Friedman and Schwartz...

For a VAR with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities, we present posterior densities for several objects that are of interest for designing and evaluating monetary policy. These include measures of inflation persistence, the natural rate of unemployment, a core rate of inflation, and...